Eventful...

Whew! It’s been an eventful week. RFIS began Thursday, and the boys had a great start to the school year. (Anna’s begins next week.) The kids in my classes are sharp, cooperative, curious and engaged. It’s a blessing to see a number of the older ones exhibit real spiritual maturity.

The “eventfulness” continued all the way to Saturday when the following coincided: our internet service still didn’t work (since Tuesday), the city turned off the water, the electricity was briefly out and, near the end of the day, Anna fell off a bike and gashed her knee deeply enough that she had to go to a clinic to get stitches. A bit of a rough day! Honestly though, it didn’t seem so bad.

Why? In part because 1) some neighbors invited us over to use their internet service; 2) unlike some folks nearby who have had no water for several days, for the most part ours has been restored; 3) the electricity came back very quickly; 4) through the kindness of a nearby family with a car, and a reasonably hygenic clinic that was open Saturday evening (rare on both counts), Anna is stitched up nicely. (And for a grand total of $10, including the follow-up antibiotic.) Go figure: in Cameroon there is only one MRI machine in the whole country (in Douala, several hours away), but stitches are $10. It makes paying $8/bottle for shampoo a bit more tolerable.

But the rough day was also not so bad because of another event that occurred this week. It’s one that happens every so often and that rallies and encourages the Wycliffe community to “keep on keeping on” amidst difficulty: another language group received the scriptures.

Mekaa is a language spoken by about 80,000 Cameroonians. The pictures you see here are of a just-finished proof copy of the New Testament in Mekaa. This is the completion of an arduous process: learning the language, creating an alphabet and getting the language into a written form, teaching it (literacy) and of course doing the translation itself. For a variety of reasons and many delays and interruptions, this was one of the longest translation efforts ever. It began in 1978 and is just now completed! This is truly a reason to celebrate, and it is the ultimate reason we are here. Praise the Lord for a very eventful week.